Dates given as “c.” are approximate. Where the record disagrees with itself, as it does on the year of birth, the disagreement is shown rather than resolved.
1947 or 1948. Born Alan Robert Krakower in Montreal, Canada. The organization that holds his work gives April 9, 1948; the family death notice gives April 9, 1947. The discrepancy is unresolved in the record.
1969. A marriage announcement in the Montreal press, consistent with his documented adult life.
1971. University convocation notice (Sir George Williams University, Bachelor of Arts).
1973. A job-appointment notice (a vice presidency at Alpha Data Ltd., Victoria, British Columbia); the documented working life in Canada (advertising, magazine publishing, media) and his music belong to this period and the years around it.
1983. Leaves Canada, his family, and his business in a single morning and drifts to Europe, and then to Ibiza.
c. 1984. Renting the intact house below the ruin in the Ibizan campo.
1985. The close approach of Halley’s Comet, which he later described as a precursor to the encounter that followed.
January 1987. The eight-day encounter in the ruin, beginning January 3, by his own account. He takes the name Ra Uru Hu.
March 1987. Gives his first Human Design reading, to the Ibiza resident Tullia Duymaer-Van Twist and her daughter Tonka.
1988. The first hand-drawn BodyGraphs; an early gathering he called a “coming out party” for the teaching.
1989. In a Frankfurt apartment, writes the Rave I Ching, a hexagram a day, fetching coal for the stove.
1992. The first public lecture, at Sant Miquel on Ibiza (February); the Rave I Ching is published. The Black Book, the system’s first edition under the pseudonym Ra Uru Hu, had appeared the year before, in 1991. The school’s pages later dated the IHDS founding to this year; the founder’s archive gives 2000 (see Chapter Nine).
Early to mid 1990s. The system is carried to America (New Sun Services America, in Taos and New Mexico). The German collaborator Jürgen Saupe brings it into print and organization (the “Black Book”); Erik Memmert builds the first software.
c. 1995. The period from which the loyal witness Genoa Bliven dates his acquaintance with him.
1996 to 1997. Eleanor Haspel-Portner enters the system; the Four Types, Strategy, Authority, and profile are introduced, by participants’ accounts, in 1997.
1999. Ra forms the research partnership with Eleanor and Marvin Portner (Rave Life Sciences) and, by her account, sets up Jovian Archive as the system’s popular arm.
c. 2000. Jovian Archive Corporation is formed, in Sedona, Arizona, by Ra’s own account, to hold the intellectual property of the system; national licensing contracts are issued across seven countries.
March 12, 2011. Dies on Ibiza.
June 3, 2020. The Tribunale di Firenze (Court of Florence) rejects the official system’s copyright claim, holding that the Human Design system as such cannot be owned as copyright.
2024. The United States trademark application for “the Human Design System” lapses.
2027. The year of the founder’s prophecy, in which, by his telling, a door closes and a cycle ends.